My computer is mostly working fine (and running fast), but I'm having a few odd behaviors:

1) When opening up the typical Windows Save As file dialog or the Open file dialog, it can take five full seconds before dialog closes and control returns to the application. This occurs even when I hit 'Cancel' on the Save As or Open dialog... it takes two or three seconds or before the application (Notepad, MS Paint, Google Chrome) resumes control.

To be clear, this doesn't cause the overall computer "freeze" - just the application.

2) When telling Windows to shut down, nothing seems to happen for ~30 seconds or more, then it begins the shutdown. The computer doesn't freeze... I can still open files, run programs, etc... until the Shutdown actual starts up.

At first, I was thinking it might be HDD that I was saving the files to (before I realized it occurs even when I hit 'Cancel' on the Save As dialog), then I was thinking it might be the SSD that the OS is installed on, but it seems like the health of both of those check out fine.

I've read many posts on the internet of people having the Open / Save As dialog being slow to open up due to network mapped drives (the dialogs open up very fast for me), but nothing about the dialog being slow to close and return to the application.

It seems like some specific component of Windows is running slow, while the rest of Windows is doing fine, because the computer in general is running fast and responsively. This is Windows 10, btw.

What's the quickest way of troubleshooting what's wrong, so I don't have to spend a full day or two reinstalling the OS and all the programs I'm currently using?

1) When opening up the typical Windows Save As file dialog or the Open file dialog, it can take five full seconds before dialog closes and control returns to the application. This occurs even when I hit 'Cancel' on the Save As or Open dialog... it takes two or three seconds or before the application (Notepad, MS Paint, Google Chrome) resumes control.

To be clear, this doesn't cause the overall computer "freeze" - just the application.

Download Very Sleepy (or a similar profiler) and attach it to your app right before you hit 'Cancel' and then stop it right when the dialog disappears, and you might get some hints.

Another great app is Process Monitor https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processmonitor.aspx, which shows every file access and handle opened etc.. thousands of events a second often, but there are filters that can limit that to a particular process or a particular type of event etc. and it can also be run for a few seconds and then paused while inspecting the data.

This is Windows 10, btw.

:D

RE: Open/Save delay; The most likely reason is to do with view settings i.e. Small Icons, Large Icons etc. while the system is busy with some other process. Switch to List or Details view.

RE: Long Shutdown; Open up your Task Manager and start seeing what kind of programs you got running in the background - you'll probably find a bunch of them running that don't need to be.

Are you using any anti-malware software?

I've read many posts on the internet of people having the Open / Save As dialog being slow to open up due to network mapped drives

Yes, this was a design decision from the 1980s that has haunted Microsoft. Too many programs and scripts rely on the Open/Save dialog to be fully-populated when it is shown, so it needs to query all the information about all the devices, including slow devices, and including waiting for network devices to time out.

it can take five full seconds before dialog closes and control returns to the application. This occurs even when I hit 'Cancel' on the Save As or Open dialog... it takes two or three seconds or before the application (Notepad, MS Paint, Google Chrome) resumes control.

My hunch is a program is hooked up as an add-on or shell extension.

While most shell extensions latch on to context menus and the opening of the dialog, they can also do work when the dialog box is closed or shut down.

Use a good tool that lets you view and disable the shell extensions that are active on your system (which is often a terrifying list to view), and use good old 'divide and conquer' to find the offending program.

When telling Windows to shut down, nothing seems to happen for ~30 seconds or more, then it begins the shutdown. The computer doesn't freeze... I can still open files, run programs, etc... until the Shutdown actual starts up.

Could be lots of issues.

Like the Open/Save dialog, the shutdown process comes from a very old design choice by Windows to hit each program and service sequentially. Wasn't much of a problem in the 1980s and early 1990s, but today's systems with potentially several hundred running services, waiting for the linear system can be painful but too many major programs depend on the existing behavior.

Start by searching for events. In the Event Viewer, under: Applications And Services Logs\Microsoft\Windows\Diagnostics-Performance\Operational log. Filter the log (right click on it) to search for shutdown events by filtering for "200-299" in the filter selection. (Yay for google that makes finding this type of garbage easier, there is no way to remember it.)

Review the notices, see if there are any warnings about hung applications or hung services. You will probably see several.

Of course, it might not have actually be 'hung', but instead be slow to respond but still respond within the time limits. Then you won't get an event log entry, which means more hunting on your part.

You can adjust the timeout parameters for applications and services independently, but be careful about doing so since many systems have a real need to write data out. There are timeouts for how long they have before they are considered hung, and once they are hung for determining of the system should kill them instantly behind your back or prompt you instead.

I tried using SysInternal's Autorun (and a few NirSoft programs) to look for system hooks that might be slowing things down, but I couldn't find anything in particular that might be causing problems. I bulk-disabled all non-Microsoft ones, but the problem still was occurring.

I also looked though the specific Event Viewer log frob mentioned, and aside a few non-consequential warnings, there was only a few errors/criticals. The only thing that looked relevant was Microsoft Office Click-To-Run service that apparently once borked out and took a long time to startup - but that seemed to be an isolated event, not reoccurring.

(as an unrelated bonus, I saw some errors that explained why my videocard kept crashing two months ago :P; Thanks frob!)

So I decided to exit every non-essential taskbar icon, and in doing so realized I had an ancient iPod plugged in via USB to the computer for the past... ~10 days, roughly around the same time period that the problem was starting. Ejecting it and unplugging it made everything behave fine.

So it was a network attached drive, kinda. Or rather, a USB-attached one. Because the iPod is configured for USB drive access, it does show up on the side of Windows Explorer as well as the Open File dialog. Weird that the dialogs opened instantly but hung on closing, though. :huh:

The long shutdown times were probably just the Windows taking a long time to cleanly eject the ancient iPod when shutting down.

I can't be 100% sure it was the iPod (plugging it back in didn't automatically reintroduce the problem), but now I can pay attention to the iPod if the freezes reoccur.

I'm glad my SSD isn't dying. :lol:

Thank you for all the help, gentlemen!

Are you using any anti-malware software?

Spybot S&D, and Windows Defender. (And before you bash Windows Defender too much, remember that from Windows 8 onward, Microsoft deleted the old junky Windows Defender, and ships the actually-pretty-decent Microsoft Security Essentials and just renamed it Windows Defender)

Both are up-to-date and I ran a full check with both, just to be sure. That doesn't rule out viruses, ofcourse, but, like handsoap, it rules out 99.99% of them (and with ten quintillion different viruses in the world, that makes me only vulnerable to a mere 3.2 zillion of them).

I also don't install tons of junk on my computer (though some accumulates over time), so that's not usually a problem either.